Ride to Hell seems pretty AAA to me.

All of that is actually wrong but ... it's replaced the real definition among consumers so it has, in effect, become the current definition.

I used to own a video and game rental store.  I did all the purchasing.  Back before "AAA" really entered the general vernacular, grades such as AA or AAA were designated by the retail industry in order to rank investment potental.

That's it.  

I got pre-release catalogs from my distributers every week with games ranked by grade.  If a game was projected to sell very well then it got the AAA rank.  I remember Nintendo DS games that we uppercrust forum-goers would never call "AAA" being designated exactly that.  On the other hand, a big budget game that was expected to sell poorly might get an AA designation.

The system itself comes straight from the investment industry, as some here probably already know.

"AAA is the highest possible rating assigned to an issuer's bonds by credit rating agencies. An AAA-rated bond has an exceptional degree of creditworthiness, because the issue can easily meet its financial commitments."  http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/aaa.asp

Pretty sure an AAA game is one with a high budget (though in a lot of cases a big part of that budget goes to marketing).

Good that they don't need super high budgets to make great games.

High budget, bigger team, better tech, bigger marketing team, higher asking price etc. All those I consider as being a part of the AAA marks to fill.

Basically its the Avatar, independence day, terminator 2 or waterworld if gaming.

They are games with the highest production and promotion budgets. In some case the money spent on promotion may even be more than that spent on making the game itself.

These games have to sell at least 1.5 - 2M units to even break even.  And though they wont say it, are usually expected to sell 3-5 times more than the average game by they publishers. 

Majority of the games released are AA or A games. but we get around 7-12 AAA games each year.

a waste of money, time and ressources.

This

To add more AAA is one of those "industry twisted terms" used to designate some higher level of importance to the next release by developers then fans take, regurgitate, then cement the term as actually having any significance thus creating more rifts categorizing of games that really only hurting ALL games not helping 

From a media/jounalistic point-of-view, an AAA game is a game with a high cost of production made by a large team.

For me, an AAA title is a title with high quality, no matter if it´s a big budget production or a classy smart indie game.

A game not made by pretentious hipsters

There is no definition because everybody uses it differently. For me, the distinguisher is the amount of targeted sales. A game like No Man's Sky is on a same AAA level as Assassin's Creed, for example. Because both want to be reongnised by the mass market, more so than a game like Mario Tennis, for example.